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Gardar - a joint Nordic computing facility in Iceland

From 2012 til 2015 DeiC took part in a Nordic project establishing a supercomputer in Iceland.

The following information is old and will not be updated. It consists of the presentation of Gardar from the DeiC web site at the time.

Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland have joined forces to establish a supercomputing facility in Iceland.

The computer, called Gardar (nhpc.hi.is), is a cluster of 288 nodes, each with 2 Intel Xeon CPU (2.53GHz) with 6 cores, which gives 3,456 cores and a theoretical capacity of 35 Teraflops. There are 24 Gbytes of RAM pr. node. The computer was inaugurated on 16. April 2012.

The operating system is Linux/ROCKS. So far the computer is used very traditionally through an SSH login on a login node. Here users may submit batch jobs via the TORQUE queuing system.

NHPC is an experiment, meant to find advantages and disadvantages of having joint system responsiblility with several other parties, and to test in practise how it will be for the user to work on a computer 35ms away. One of the advantages of Iceland in this project is that they have a surplus production of CO2-neutral electricity which is therefore almost free of charge.

Interested users are encouraged to sign up

Use of Gardar is open to all interested users, according to the following guidelines:

The applicant should belong to a Danish university.

Time will generally be granted in increments of 1 day and 1 week on the entire computer.

The applicant briefly describes his or her resource needs, the academic area, and the technical requirements.

Resources are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

When there is a need for prioritization between applications it will be done in cooperation with the universities, taking into account the assurance of best use of the Danish part of Gardar and the spread to the widest groups and universities.

It is the intention that the barrier to get time allocated on Gardar is as low as possible, making it possible to use the computer for testing purposes, scaling tests, smaller projects and validation before applications for other HPC resources.

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About DeiC

DeiC – Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation has the stated aim of supporting the development of Denmark as an eScience nation through the delivery of e-infrastructure (computing, data warehousing, network connections and auxiliary services), guidance, and initiatives at national level. DeiC is a virtual unit under the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science and the result of an agreement concluded between the eight Danish universities and the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education. For details, see www.deic.dk.